Accelerate your back-up into the future

January 14, 2014 00:00
By Nathakorn Potejanasaja

Everyone knows the fateful tale of the Three Little Pigs, who built their houses with different materials - straw, wood and bricks. Only one of the little pigs survived, because he had built a robust architecture with risk and performance in mind that cou

Had they worked together to build a unified, optimised architecture, all three could have survived. Data silos, like the Three Little Pigs, are equally susceptible to big bad wolves such as online threats, data loss and system failures.

Asia-Pacific is in a phase of rapid change and growth, with different levels of business and technological maturity. From entering different markets and facing different regulatory requirements, combined with the trends of consumerisation of IT and BYOD (bring your own device), businesses face significant pressures to keep ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, such rapid change means different business teams tend to deploy their own storage, back-up, application and virtualisation architecture.

Like the Three Little Pigs, organisational teams should not fall into the chaos of an “accidental architecture” – building their own separate back-up, disaster recovery and archive solutions. The sheer growth of data, combined with evolving data-protection technology, means that teams must consolidate their storage architecture for better protection and for business continuity and compliance purposes.

So how exactly do you build an intentional protection storage architecture? First, storage needs to be cost- and capacity-optimised with high data durability that can deliver fast, efficient disaster recovery, back-up and archive.

Secondly, back-up and recovery needs to be fast and at the same time provide internal customers with visibility into the protection of their data. The protection storage architecture leverages both the optimised data flows and user interfaces of the data sources: hypervisor, application and storage.

Thirdly, providing internal stakeholders with the information they want, in a quick and easily digestible way, will encourage them to adhere to data-management and -access policies. The value-added services could be in the form of compliance reports, policy, analytics, data discovery, and more.

With this visibility, there is an instant capture of where data is stored, how to find it, who is accessing the data, and when. This optimises utilisation but also enables tight security controls to maintain the integrity of the data and systems.

The rules of data protection have changed from thinking of data protection as a cost centre to thinking of it as a strategic investment in your business’s future. Back-up, in particular, has transformed from a “low-value, high-cost insurance policy” to a “business accelerator”.

In today’s dynamic business and virtualised IT environment, organisations need to provide employees with fast, secure access to data as well as data-management services that allow them to get value from information.

If organisations don’t make changes to the way they protect and manage their data, they could just meet the same disastrous fate as the Three Little Pigs.

Nathakorn Potejanasaja is country manager at EMC Information Systems (Thailand).

Had they worked together to build a unified, optimised architecture, all three could have survived. Data silos, like the Three Little Pigs, are equally susceptible to big bad wolves such as online threats, data loss and system failures.

Asia-Pacific is in a phase of rapid change and growth, with different levels of business and technological maturity. From entering different markets and facing different regulatory requirements, combined with the trends of consumerisation of IT and BYOD (bring your own device), businesses face significant pressures to keep ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, such rapid change means different business teams tend to deploy their own storage, back-up, application and virtualisation architecture.

Like the Three Little Pigs, organisational teams should not fall into the chaos of an “accidental architecture” – building their own separate back-up, disaster recovery and archive solutions. The sheer growth of data, combined with evolving data-protection technology, means that teams must consolidate their storage architecture for better protection and for business continuity and compliance purposes.

So how exactly do you build an intentional protection storage architecture? First, storage needs to be cost- and capacity-optimised with high data durability that can deliver fast, efficient disaster recovery, back-up and archive.

Secondly, back-up and recovery needs to be fast and at the same time provide internal customers with visibility into the protection of their data. The protection storage architecture leverages both the optimised data flows and user interfaces of the data sources: hypervisor, application and storage.

Thirdly, providing internal stakeholders with the information they want, in a quick and easily digestible way, will encourage them to adhere to data-management and -access policies. The value-added services could be in the form of compliance reports, policy, analytics, data discovery, and more.

With this visibility, there is an instant capture of where data is stored, how to find it, who is accessing the data, and when. This optimises utilisation but also enables tight security controls to maintain the integrity of the data and systems.

The rules of data protection have changed from thinking of data protection as a cost centre to thinking of it as a strategic investment in your business’s future. Back-up, in particular, has transformed from a “low-value, high-cost insurance policy” to a “business accelerator”.

In today’s dynamic business and virtualised IT environment, organisations need to provide employees with fast, secure access to data as well as data-management services that allow them to get value from information.

If organisations don’t make changes to the way they protect and manage their data, they could just meet the same disastrous fate as the Three Little Pigs.

Nathakorn Potejanasaja is country manager at EMC Information Systems (Thailand).